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Video-Conferencing Facilities in IF-5.02

This meeting room has recently been fitted out as a Huddle room with video-conferencing facilities for laptops. The system in place is the BiAmp DevIO (CR-1). Note that this is still a prototype system for evaluation purposes so YMMV.

All Informatics staff and postgraduate students can use these facilities. If you wish to make a booking, book the meeting room in the usual way. While the system remains under evaluation there is no direct support in place, should you encounter any problems while using these facilities please refer to the web.

Do not under any circumstances try to reset the system to factory defaults as this will NOT resolve any issues and will render the system inoperable until technical help can be found.

Overview

The system provides a room camera, beam forming noise cancellation table conferencing microphone and dual displays. These replace the built in camera, microphone and display on your own laptop. Any video conferencing suite of your choice can then be run on your laptop using this external hardware. We recommend Zoom or the University system Collaborate and instructions for both are given below.

Physical Connection

We strongly recommend using the DisplayLink driver (available for MacOS, Windows and Linux). This means all the external hardware can be connected to your laptop via the single blue USB cable. Not all laptops may be physically capable of driving both displays over the DisplayLink USB connection however. Older laptops and software versions may not support DisplayLink. Alternatively you can use the blue USB cable to connect the camera and microphone to your laptop and connect a display via the HDMI adaptor and cable you have with your laptop onto the socket at the front of the BiAmp box. Note that only one display can be driven in this way, DisplayLink must be used for dual display output.

Download and install the appropriate DisplayLink Driver for your laptop, you will only need to do this once. You may need to reboot afterwards.

Connect your laptop by USB using the blue cable (and HDMI cable if not using DisplayLink). The right hand display should show your laptop screen and the camera should wake up. If the display remains blank make sure it isn not on standby (red light at bottom right corner) - if it is turn it on by pressing the button on the back (closest to the standby light), the standby light will go green and the display should show your laptop screen. Depending on your laptop you should be able to configure screen mirroring and multiple displays.

To use the camera and microphone you need to configure your video conferencing software to use them, see below.

Audio only works through HDMI and the display at the moment - make sure you choose the HDMI audio output option in your video conferencing software (irrespective of whether over USB DisplayLink or direct HDMI connection).